The Guitar

Influenced by the traditions of flamenco guitar music in his country as well as his other role as dramatist, Lorca begins his poem as though he were a narrator setting the scene for his main character, or a musician playing the first few notes to set the mood. Line 1 directly states the action of “the weeping of the guitar” (Line 1). Line 3 expresses that “the goblets of dawn/are smashed” (Lines 3-4), suggesting spectacular destruction as well as the breaking of glass when musicians reach a particular note, especially the high-pitch cry of cante jondo singing. A relentless and even melancholic tone results. Line 5 repeats that the guitar is weeping, enhancing the major action of the poem and reinforcing the personification of the guitar. Using repetition once again, Lorca shows the intensity of the sobbing: “Useless/to silence it” (Lines 7-8) and “Impossible/to silence it” (Lines 9-10). To address the intensity even more clearly, as if building the rising actions of a play or increasing to a crescendo in music, he uses similes to compare the drone of the guitar’s weeping to the crying of water and wind “over snowfields” (Line 14). The continued use of personification, now of wind and water, suggests the universal act of weeping across entities, time, and borders. It also implies the proclivity of a guitar to utter its sound just as other natural forces of the earth utter theirs. For a third time, to drive home the aural and visual imagery of the guitar weeping, he repeats that it is “impossible/to silence it” (Lines 15-16). Silence is the opposition of the guitar’s musicality. Lorca finally addresses the rationale for the intense weeping: “It weeps for distant/things” (Lines 17-18). He uses pairs to elucidate how distance and longing go hand in hand. In lines 19-20, he mentions “hot southern sands” (Line 19), likely attributed to Andalusia in southern Spain (the origin of flamenco music), wanting “white camellias” (Line 20), flowers native to southern Asia that require much water. He goes on to address an “arrow without target” (Line 21), since one requires the other to complete an action, and “evening without morning” (Line 22), two opposite times that are part of a unified cycle. He ends this series of examples with the “first dead bird/on the branch (Lines 23-24),” referring to the end of life during the season of rebirth and, therefore, abruptly signaling his descent into the death imagery and tone that pervade the end of the poem. In Line 25, the speaker of the poem uses apostrophe, directly addressing the guitar for the first time as if with friendly sympathy or warning about what is to come: “Oh, guitar!” (Line 25). The final two lines represent the climax or the crescendo of the intense, long phases of weeping: the guitar’s broken heart and inability to play music any more. Lorca exposes the guitar’s human mortality with crisp imagery of a Romantic-style death: “Heart mortally wounded/by five swords” (Lines 26-27). Another way of viewing the poem’s ending is that the listeners of the flamenco guitar’s playing are struck by such powerful emotions that they feel them physically in their bodies.